I'm a bit over halfway through the book, so if you've read it, maybe you won't need me to post the spoiler.
In the past year, I read T. H. White's The Once and Future King and Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment, and The Wicked Day.
TMoA has been in my reading list since I was much too young to understand the story from the perspective of women (I'm a woman, but I definitely wasn't raised with the idea that a woman's perspective was necessary to get a full, clear, truthful picture – women had equality, and everyone's experience is the same! 👍👍👍). My sister must have been reading it in college, and I was probably in high school.
Anyway, so I've read a decent amount of the lore, and I'm enjoying the transformations of each tale so far. I thought T.H. White's version was fun, and Mary Stewart's series was incredibly well written and intriguing considering the perspective of Merlin and of Mordred, and how things were changed to make the final fate the result of complex misunderstandings. TMoA is proving to be so engrossing! It started off so, but the last few chapters I read – especially the last – is so far from where I realized it was going. There's depth I really wasn't expecting. Maybe I'm just awful at making predictions, maybe I just know too little background about the other religions, myths, and culture of the time, but I feel almost blindsided by the suddenness of events.
I'm wondering what others think of the book overall, out of you know what event I'm describing, maybe you remember how you felt reading it.
I will add this: some of my notes bemoan Gwenyfar's characterization, then later I add that I understand why Bradley would write her in such a way (for the plot, of course; I just took forever to see where it was going). Maybe I'm just too rigid, not imaginative enough considering I had so recently read the other versions and couldn't think of alternate pathways.
What do you all think of the book? (And please, no spoilers for me! I clearly enjoy being surprised. 😅)
by lux_et_umbra